Swatch watches, wrapping around our wrists. Big hair defying gravity with the help of Aquanet. Could Aquanet be the single-handed reason for the destruction of the ozone layer, one can at a time? And music. God, the music. It rivaled any generation, maybe even the latter half of the 1960s.

This was 1984.

What a year.

George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 about a totalitarian state systematically destroying language, collapsing words into fewer and fewer meanings until people can’t even form thoughts the Party disapproves of. One man tries to rebel, tries to find a real human connection. But the system breaks him. In the end, he comes to love the regime, thereby erasing his ability to think freely.

Having lived through 1984, I can tell you life wasn’t anything like that.

Junior high school, though? Junior high was a nightmare.

GenX Code

Bullies. Roaming the halls completely unchecked. Teachers tolerate their behavior, some even condoning it. Most administrators spent their time looking the other way. We didn’t call them out. We’d never rat out another kid. It’s the GenX code. I’m not sure why, but it worked. Maybe we thought it was for our own good. Perhaps we feared retaliatory harassment would get worse. Our Baby Boomer parents, and all the real GenXers, taught each other to suck it up and stuff it down. Emotions weren’t something we dealt with. We never spoke about how those bullies made us feel. We never showed it when it became too much.

Unless it erupted in an outburst, putting all other bullies on notice.

When that happened? It came so radically, so out of character, that no one mentioned it. Not ever again.

Where We Belonged

Who caught the brunt of the bullying? Us, the social outcasts. Nerds. Geeks. Kids who loved comic books and science fiction. We read Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and J.R.R. Tolkien way before Peter Jackson’s 2001 Lord of the Rings movies made hobbits cool. We read Stephen King. Girls read V.C. Andrews’ gothic, creepy stories.

In 1975, two years before Star Wars: A New Hope hit theaters, Steven Spielberg’s JAWS became a blockbuster. Many of us were die-hard Star Wars fans by then, waiting for the next movie. Return of the Jedi had come out a year earlier, and we were hungry for more. (Sixteen years we’d wait to see the newest Star Wars: The Phantom Menace).

I got swept up into the science fiction, puzzle-solving, smart-kids arena. Not because I wanted to affiliate with the nerds or geeks, but because, like it or not, I was one of them. Was I smart? Look at my eighth-grade report card and you’d say otherwise. Yet I had a brain for solving puzzles, choosing to use my talent to write, but only when I felt like it. Homework? Forget it. Unless it was a creative writing project for Mrs. Henke’s English class. Then she could count on my creative writing.

I was an extrovert, once upon a time. But the emotional abuse I’d suffered? It made me look like an introvert. Gross.

You Either Played Or You Didn’t

In the 1980s, dudes fell into two groups: either you played sports, like all of them, or you didn’t. Those guys who really loved sports? Probably did so because their fathers instilled it in them at a young age. The rest of us? Like me? We were outcasts. All because we couldn’t hit, run, shoot, or tackle other kids. Well, we probably could’ve.

But we didn’t want to.

Physical sports weren’t our forte. Think about it. Would you like to be ostracized for one more thing?

We didn’t.

Escape Routes

Instead of working on homework, I created secret codes. Decipherable, sure, but only if you had the key. I made many of them more complicated than I expected. I started working on my own language, like Tolkien, but it quickly became too complex for me. I quit. Another one of my patterns: if it was too hard? Give up.

It was easier that way.

1984.

That was the year I started listening to music, watching it come alive in music videos. MTV shaped what I listened to and dictated what I wanted to hear. Visuals paired with music? Hell yeah!

Every musician who wanted to sell cassettes and records needed a spectacular video. MTV played all of them: Thriller, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy, and Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got to Do with It.

I recorded songs off the radio, often with the DJ talking over them. That way, I didn’t have to purchase a cassette full of music I didn’t want to listen to. Most cassettes had one or two decent songs. Except for Prince’s Purple Rain, but I wouldn’t learn that until after high school. The rest? Bogus. Gnarly. We didn’t have “meh” in our lexicon yet.

Forty-One Years Later

George Orwell’s dystopia never came true in 1984. But we lived through our own version of it—a world where bullies rewrote the rules, where speaking up meant becoming a bigger target, where showing emotion meant weakness.

We survived by creating our own languages, our own codes, our own worlds. We found refuge in science fiction, in music videos, in cassette tapes recorded off the radio with DJ chatter bleeding into the opening notes.

We were the outcasts, the nerds, the geeks. The ones who didn’t fit the mold our schools and parents tried to force us into.

And somehow, we made it through.

Forty-one years later, I look back at 1984 and see it for what it was: not Orwell’s nightmare, but a crucible forging who we became. Bullies faded. Outcasts found each other. And the music? Played on.

The best rebellion is refusing to let them break you.